A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), MegaBits is a smartphone game played in the ‘real world’ through being reactive to each player’s environment. The company launched at Startup Weekend Pittsburgh in 2012, and the game’s community consists of around 1,000 users.

MegaBits allows users to catch, train and battle monsters. The MB team has created a customized game world by combining real-time map and weather data with an 8-bit design.

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“We’ve had to adapt our product to a more modern, mobile gaming system,” MegaBits founder Patrick Perini said. “We’ve learned the lesson from our alpha and beta process that we can’t just copy traditional [role playing games]…MegaBits is unique in its pairing of location-based augmented reality with the popular monster training genre. Unlike other mobile games, MegaBits creates a real-world-based experience that is ever-changing and evolving.”

MegaBits hopes to progress the depth of the MMORPG experience for gamers through greater integration of a player’s environment, while developing more fluid in-app spending opportunities. Perini believes MegaBits is an example of how game platforms can be grown like any other kind of startup.

“Mobile gaming is full of pain points; in-app purchase models, general inanity, poor controls, and [MegaBits] is uniquely positioned to address many of these issues, and create a mature mobile gaming experience,” Perini said. “The mobile gaming market is crowded. And though we’ve carved out an identifiable niche, we still have to find their attention and keep their attention.”

The ‘right thing,’ in the case of MegaBits, is a more dynamic world of pixelated monster hunting– built upon the already-validated market demand for MMORPGs on smartphones. MegaBits currently has six full-time employees, of whom Perini is the only remaining Startup Weekend member.

“At the beginning of 2014, I was fielding other job offers and genuinely considering closing up shop, before the product even got to market,” Perini said. “When the Google Maps Pokémon Challenge launched, I was able to corral user response into evidence of market demand, and use that [to] raise our most recent round of funding.”

As you can see from the MegaBits launch party, there is no shortage of enthusiasm with this team of gamers. Check out megabitsapp.com for product updates, information about MMORPGs, and for a free download.

It was Roy Leban’s love for building things that brought him to a Startup Weekend in 2009 – not his desire to become an entrepreneur.

“I don’t think it makes sense to say someone is or isn’t an entrepreneur,” Leban said. “It’s an unnecessary label that serves more to exclude than include. I like building things and have since I was a young kid.”

Leban pitched and built FriendMosaic, an algorithm for compiling mosaic portraits from a user’s Twitter followers that can be placed on merchandise or other social profiles. Leban and team made their first sale during the Sunday night demo.

“It was a hectic weekend of furious design and coding, but we built a fully-functional prototype and were able to demo it live for the judges,” Craig Huizenga, Leban’s teammate and future co-founder, said.

They auctioned off the right to be FriendMosaic’s first customer. Brian Gorbett, who worked for Microsoft BizSpark at the time, triumphed in some spirited bidding, with a final price of $200. The team sold another 150 shirts that night, one for each person in the room. In a rarity for Startup Weekend, the FriendMosaic team was left with some profit. That immediate profit allowed the company to make a splash at the Twitter Conference three weeks later, by giving away shirts to all the speakers.

Picture (2009): The first shirt that was sold to Brian Gorbett at Startup Weekend, even UP Global CEO Marc Nager got a shirt.

“It’s not a ‘problem’ company,” Leban said. “It’s a fun company – give people something fun they couldn’t have gotten before.”

Leban and Huizenga teamed up after the event and took some time to ‘make it real.’ Huizenga spent 100% of his time on development while Leban spent about 75% of his time on development and the rest on getting the business going.

Forty-five days after their debut at Startup Weekend, FriendMosaic was entirely automated by Huizenga and Leban. This allowed Huizenga to return to developing music management software and Leban to build puzzle technology startup Puzzazz. Five years later, FriendMosaic sold to Mosaically Inc, who acquired the site and the technology behind FriendMosaic to bolster their online mosaic offering.

“Because we built the system on top of the Zazzle API for product creation and fulfillment, it was able to run itself, with minimal maintenance necessary,” Leban said. “The decision to use Zazzle was one of the best decisions we made. I always say startups should do one thing, and our thing wasn’t actually making physical products.”

Other companies with mosaic software use fixed or uploaded libraries of images, but the FriendMosaic Twitter feature was new and dynamic.

“I’m glad we found an acquirer that has built a solid platform and will be able to take our adaptive mosaic creation technology to the next level,” Leban said.

BY THE NUMBERS:

Time line:

August 28, 2009 – pitched at Startup Weekend, 7-person team organized

August 30, 2009 – demoed working version at Startup Weekend

First sale, an auctioned-off “first” T-shirt (sold for $200)

Second sale, an order for 150 shirts from Microsoft, event sponsor

September 2, 2009 – decided to found a 2-person team to take it forward

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll quit my job. Here you go—technical cofounder. Bam!”
And as simple as B–A–M, GiftStarter was transformed from a cool idea into a serious startup.

Yu knew she was on to something after pitching her idea (she wasn’t planning on it), finding a team (the team found her), and winning a Startup Weekend in late March 2014 (the Sunday-night demo was a hit). She realized that the team and the momentum she had achieved were rare in any endeavor, including startups. She described the decision to go all in as “really a no- brainer.” When you hear this from an overachieving Cornell graduate and former management consultant with enterprise clients like Microsoft, Cisco, Google, and T-Mobile – you appreciate that the phrase “no-brainer” is not used lightly.

Growing up in upstate New York, Yu had every intention of pursuing a career at an investment bank on Wall Street. But early on she was exposed to entrepreneurship by watching her mother start several small businesses. Yu’s formative years also included stints as an artist, musician, furniture maker, and waitress. Her most recent “real jobs” were with Microsoft and management consulting firms while she dabbled in startup ideas on the side. Listening to her recount these experiences, I begin to see that her savvy mix of artistic sensibility, determination, and intelligence is better suited for a startup than for Wall Street.

We’re chatting over coffee in a conference room high above downtown Seattle at SURF Incubator and 9Mile Labs on a cloudy Seattle morning. Yu is previewing GiftStarter with me while describing the human and emotional touches that are missing from most digital gift giving.

“We are a very human-centric company. It has to be emotional,” she says, unveiling a beautifully personalized print piece that precedes every GiftStarter gift delivery. I see—and feel—what she means.

It wasn’t always so clear. What started out as a “Kickstarter for gifts” in March proceeded into the Startup Next program (a benefit of winning a Startup Weekend.) There it “pivoted several times a week—and came out as a slightly different company. But with more tough muscles— and with the realization of how quick we have to move and how to do customer validation. That DNA was drilled into us and remains with us today.”

“They were like, ‘Let’s see how you hustle!’”

While Startup Next provided great training, the application process for 9Mile Labs’ accelerator upped the level of rigor and effort. “Over July Fourth weekend—on Wednesday—they said, ‘You need to interview to six brands that are retailers and then 10 customers and report back on Tuesday’ We were like, ‘It’s Fourth of July weekend!’ They were like, ‘Let’s see how you hustle!’”

I got the impression that hustle and success haven’t been much of a problem for Yu and her growing team. They went on to be accepted into 9Mile where they just completed their November Demo Day.

GiftStarter is one of 10 startups in the recent accelerator program at 9Mile Labs.

Like most accelerator teams in coworking spaces, the GiftStarter team is huddled around a few small tables, with computer screens, whiteboards, and Post-it walls taking up almost every inch of real estate. However, it’s clear the clutter doesn’t take anyone away from focusing on the product, the experience, and the customer.

Co-founders Arry Yu and Stuart Owen at 9Mile Labs, Fall 2014.

GiftStarter seems to have gotten it right without losing the spark of that Sunday night pitch back in March—or at least their partner roster would indicate as much. It takes Yu, Owen, and GiftStarter’s partner lead Roy Shin an average of 15 minutes to close after making initial presentations.

Rounding out the rest of her company profile I ask Yu which vertical they operate in. “We are a meta market maker,” she responds. I take this to mean that she intends to create a unique market of gifting across verticals. “I suppose you could call us a social commerce enabler,” she adds. Her response makes it clear to me that Yu is truly an entrepreneur. Nothing is ever boring to her, and no category is beyond being busted.

Check out GiftStarter’s new gifting experience here— www.GiftStarter.co—just in time for the holidays.

Jobs created: 7
Products shipped: 100 gifts (with virtually no marketing beyond friends and family)
Average gift size $350
Revenue: $18,000
Customer statistic: 20% of people who pitch in for a GiftStarter gift become GiftStarters for the next group gift

The two brainstormed while training for a half-marathon together, and pondered startups that could offer direct value to parents. A mother with more than 12 years of experience in the software industry, Shrinidhi was a natural partner for Banerjee, and after completing their race, the two had found something else to achieve together.

Magicflix currently offers age-appropriate videos for young kids 12 and under, in an app that is closely curated by educators working for the company. The videos are selected based upon how well they blend fun and education for youngsters.

Sometimes, adolescents seek out content which is meant for more mature audiences. Othertimes, they stumble upon it accidentally– particularly in the age of tablets.

Magicflix is designed to allow kids to share in the joy of streaming-video, without the body parts or violence of other video apps. Children can indulge in fun, educational content that has been picked out for them based on specific interests.

Magicflix launched in the app store Monday, a year after the two mothers began planning. Their startup has spent the last year researching the way in which children interact and learn from video, and are hours away from finishing Techstars Seattle.

The Magiflix team also completed UP Global’s Startup Next program in preparation for being accepted into an accelerator. Banerjee had this to say about how Startup Next was able to help her startup grow.

“Startup Next was a great stepping stone for our company – a forcing function which helped us think through several aspects of the business beyond the product; the mentors, the sessions, the network and the guidance exceeded our expectations. While the support and encouragement we received from the program bolstered us on several fronts.”

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Company: Magicflix, The Safe Kids Video App

Location: Seattle, WA

Program Graduate: Startup Next

Products Shipped: Preloaded on over 100,000 kids tablets

Revenue Generated: Monthly subscription service will be activated soon

Partners signed up: Magicflix is preloaded on the Kurio and ClickNKids Kids tablets, which are available at retail outlets like Walmart and ToysRUs.